


Resurgence

by Kes



Series: Thor 2 Rewritten: The Shaded Tree [5]
Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-06
Updated: 2014-04-06
Packaged: 2018-01-18 09:35:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1423585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kes/pseuds/Kes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Far away, beyond sight of Asgardian eyes, the war-ravaged dark elves are waking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Resurgence

Far away, so far from the trunk of Yggdrasill that no golden watcher could quite see, a ship stirs in the blackness. Oily red pulses inside it like blood, and slowly the lights go up, alerted by the unstoppable movement of the realms towards each other.

Inside, the turbines burn hotter and hotter, blue light shoots from terminus to terminus, and intricate characters blink on and off in the darkness. From the command quarters to the crammed further reaches, capsule after capsule is engulfed in shimmering red. The black carapaces slide open, and one after another the bodies within gasp the first breath of air in five thousand years through their breathing tubes.

By the time Algrim awakes, Malekith is already at the arch looking out onto the slow revival of their people. “How long?” he asks, joining him but staying a pace behind, to the right. The long hibernation has dulled the pain a little, but it still pulses inside him and he can see it still, with the impossible burden of responsibility, on Malekith _aihuate_ ’s shining face.

“Not long enough. I can sense it, but it is faint, so faint. We must move quickly.”

“Is there no time to – recover at all?” He wants to reach out, but the forbidding bleakness on the other’s face stops him.

“What we have not recovered cannot be recovered. All else besides this is gone, taken by Bor.”

Algrim does not point out that it was Malekith’s hands that cut power to the other greatships. Malekith’s hands, perhaps, but Bor’s responsibility.

“He will be dead now, but if any of his kin live… They will know our wrath before they know the darkness.”

“That is your plan, my lord?” Heart leaping, he almost breaks mourning sobriety.

Slowly Malekith turns, his hands trailing on the ship as though he needs the touch to retain sensation. “Of course. We are creatures of the dark. This lighted abomination has run its course, and once we have the means, we will show them who the powers in this verse are.”

Below them the blade commanders are assembling, fidgeting with their braids of command. Most of them were new-woven before the hibernation; there had been no order to the escape. Those who had reached the Darkstar ship survived; those who had not did not. New commands were forged, new allegiances, to try to keep the noncombatants well-protected and the fighting units in good order. Somewhere on the ship, a child cries, and Algrim no longer has to try to keep up mourning demeanor. His own system had been on the Satellite ship. “It is fitting revenge.”

“Ready the blades, nihote. We will need to send scouts to find our way in; we have slept too long. The worlds are strange to us.” Malekith steps away from the arch, towards him.

“The worlds have always been strange to us.”

“This is the curse of the darklings,” he says, and touches Algrim’s face with his thumb, gently, just above the breathing tube. “For yearning we looked into the light, and for turning were cursed to roam it.”

Algrim continues the line. “For lighted life is life bereft.”

For a moment he thinks Malekith is going to break mourning, but he does not. Instead he steps away, towards the door, white cloak flapping behind him. “Satellite of the Darkstar, ready the blades.”

“It is done, Lord Malekith.” No-one among the blade commanders will oppose him; the carnage still burns inside all of them, and they are all sworn. His wounds are their wounds, their wounds his, and all united in this sick grief.

-

Darkstar was never meant to be this crowded. The centrepoint of her level is filling with _darhyada_ , and the capsules are not empty yet. Already a message has come through from the Core to summon her, but she cannot see that any need of the Darkstar’s can be greater than that of these people. She signals to her new satellite, Egremal, and he scurries off for food; how much of the pain in her stomach is hunger and how much grief is irrelevent. They have survived the long hibernation – mostly – and so they must be hungry. “I have ordered food brought,” she tells a frail engineer with her wispy hair pulled back like an old soldier, and doesn’t show the fear that the food will have run out. The greatships run their own food synthesis plants, but Darkstar was never a normal greatship, its military and diplomatic structures far extended and its sustenance capacity reduced.

“Alflyse,” Termanu says, and she jumps. “Two dead in hibernation,” ey says, eir mask on crooked.

“Who?” Dread pushes at her chest.

“Dygare, and... Kimareth askarte.”

Gently she places a hand on Termanu’s shoulder, her own memories tearing at her mind. “Your loss is mine, fothasta. May he rise once more in darkness.” Ey reaches blindly for her arm and holds it, grips it tight. Torn between her duty to her soldier and her duty to these people and the Darkstar’s summons, she calls Meleron. He prises Termanu’s hands off her and holds them, touches eir helmet’s forehead with his.

There is nothing more for her to do here that cannot wait, and so she forces her mask into place on the damaged sockets of her suit and steps into the coursing. Two other blade commanders are there – _lihuad_ blade and _anduyon_ blade darkstar, she knows the braid patterns, but she doesn’t know the people. Still, she greets them.

“What would you say we are called for?” one of them asks, introducing emself as Niade.

She shifts her hand on the railing. “To try again, I am sure.” The theory is sound; send the Aether through enough realms in the convergence, and it will gain enough power to tear a hole in this verse and let them pass back into darkness. It has never been done before. It has never needed to be done before; verses have come and gone and always they have slept through them and awoken once more in the dark beyond. In the light, the dark is hard to remember, but she knows she has experienced it like that. This verse is different. Something is holding it together, stopping it from failing and letting them free, and the advisory orbital predicted in the last cycle that it could last eternities more before it would eventually succumb to the inevitable.

“From the start?” Elthanor’s tone conveys all the dread that Alflyse feels at the thought of that, of starting to conquer parts of the other realms again so that the Aether can be brought unimpeded to its full power, of fighting whoever is calling those realms theirs this cycle, and perhaps of failing again when they hang by a thread as it is – and first, they still have to retrieve the Aether.

“I’m not the Darkstar, I don’t know,” she replies wearily.

Niade blows a breath across the holes in eir mask and says, sheltered by the roar of the coursing, “I’m not ready.” Eir braid, like hers, is untidy, rushed, inexpert; the ceremonies were short and perfunctory, all the normal procedures discarded. To become a blade commander, even on a lesser ship like her original Triblade, used to be a long process and one requiring great experience just to start. On the Darkstar ship, neither she nor, she thinks, Niade, would even have been placed in a blade at all.

As the side chitters open, she whispers to em, “I know.” The Core is already full, and she counts all but three of the blade commanders for the Darkstar ship present, along with what’s left of the advisory orbital, the leaders of the engineers, and two recorders. Above them, Lord Malekith Darkstar talks inaudibly to his Satellite-shadow. She takes her place in the ranks as _feande_ blade commander.


End file.
